In remote sensing/aerial imaging industry, imagery may be used to capture views of a geographic area in order to identify and measure objects and/or structures within the images as well as to be able to determine geographic locations of points within the image. These are generally referred to as “geo-referenced images” and come in two basic categories:
Vertical Imagery, also known as Nadir Imagery—images captured with a camera pointed vertically downward thus generally capturing the tops of structures; and,
Oblique Imagery—images captured with a camera aimed at an angle capturing the sides, as well as, tops of structures.
Geo-referenced imagery may contain information regarding geographic location of the area depicted in the imagery. The information may be in the form of real-world geographic coordinates for points and/or pixels in the imagery. The geographic information may allow data processing operators to take measurements, such as distances and dimensions of objects and elements in the imagery, by choosing points and/or pixels in the imagery. Aerial imagery may also be used to identify and locate buildings, man-made structures, and natural elements such as hills, valleys, rivers, lakes, land contours, and terrain. For example, government entities may want to identify structures, or natural elements within a region. Power companies may want to measure line sag of electrical lines or determine encroaching man-made or natural structures. Assessors may want to measure building dimensions and generally rely on building dimensions to assess a value to that building.
Currently, systems exist that are able to take a geographic location, search through a database of oblique and vertical images, find the image that contains the desired location, and display that image to the data processing operator. Systems may allow the data processing operator to take measurements on the image, obtain the geographic location of points in the image, search by geographic location, and pan and scroll through the large areas of coverage contained in the geospatial database. One such system is Pictometry Connect—an oblique image based geospatial engine that embodies many of the features described above and described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,424,133, issued Sep. 9, 2008. However, all of these capabilities present issues when trying to process data from aerial imagery and yet protect geospatially sensitive information.
Many governments and companies have the need to process sensitive geospatial data. For instance, creating high accuracy ortho-mosaics or 3D models of military bases or mapping equipment infrastructure along utility corridors. In these cases, there are homeland security issues with foreign nationals or individuals without proper security clearance knowing the precise geographic location of these critical assets. For these security reasons, it is generally forbidden to do geospatial processing outside of a federal government entity, even though outside processing labor rates may be a fraction of the cost of processing within the federal government entity. What is needed is a solution that allows geospatial processing in non-sensitive operator environments while protecting sensitive geographic data.